Bob. If you want to increase your membership.
From a business perspective, I place more value and emphasis on increasing "paying membership" than simply "membership". We don't run this company from an "old internet" perspective (eyeballs are all that matters), but from more of a "bricks and mortar" perspective (get people in the store and, more importantly, entice them to buy things).
It's a bit of a balancing act, because the more members we have, the higher our costs of running the site. Bandwidth and hardware are very expensive. If too many of those members stick around and never populate the coffers with coinage, we go into the red.
Keep in mind that during the internet bubble, eyeballs were valuable because the going rates for advertising were along the lines of dollars (as high as $40) per thousand ad impressions. Today, they're a tiny fraction of that amount, although improving.
In the current ad environment, the cost of serving those eyeballs handily outstrips the ad income they produce.
That's why we're so reliant on subscription income. Subscriptions are our bread; advertising is a bit of butter for it.
So our model is, and always will be, to give basic access and basic features for free, but to reserve "the good stuff" for subscribers. And, several hours per week, give the free members a taste of "the good stuff", so they'll be more inclined to pay.
But if a pizza joint gives away 3 free slices of pizza per day, every day, they're not going to be selling many pizzas. If they give away a few bites of cheese pizza per day and occasionally let everyone have a free slice of their deep-dish Supreme pizza (no anchovies), they'll likely sell some pizzas.
At least we hope so, since that's basically how our business model works.
Second they need to have the freedom to post at least 40 posts a day if they want.
Preferably more!
Otherwise they will put up with RB no matter how bad it runs.
I can point you out to posts from stock groups posters that prove that statement!
You need to increase the happy hour times during trading hours frequently.
You follow the above and within 2 to 3 months your membership will increase greatly.
True. But it's a bad thing. If we get inundated with a LOT of new members, we're going to be in a tough spot because our current hardware can't handle the load (about 3 times our current load would be the limit) and the bills for bandwidth would skyrocket. And ad revenue won't cover it. Not even remotely.
And what you suggest would definitely decrease our member/subscriber ratio. If you give people everything they could possibly want (and effectively limitless posting privileges is one such thing), there's no inducement to buy anything.
Traffic doesn't pay. It costs.
You aren't the only game in town.
Very true and I wouldn't have it any other way. If a thousand users are evaluating different sites and few of them will ever pony up for a subscription, it would hurt us as a business to accommodate them.
To put it another way, and to more specifically address what I know you're getting at, the member/subscriber ratio is more important than the number of members.
Groups such as IDCC, Zeev's Group, and the AIM group have member/subscriber ratios of 1:10 or better. That's very good. Some other large groups are closer to 1:500.
If a group of 10,000 members comes along and their ratio is 1:500, we'll get 20 subscriptions from them. That doesn't even come close to offsetting the cost of having so much more traffic. As an aside, if they're doing a lot of posting, the costs go WAY up because posting is the most expensive part of hardware costs.
If a group of 1000 members comes along and their ratio is 1:10, we'll get 100 subscribers. Subscription income for that group more than offsets the cost of handling the group's traffic.
So we're not really looking to get the whole market-related message-board universe onto our sites. And we definitely don't want to give everyone so much for free that there's no reason for them to ever pay.
We're a message board company and we think size is cool, but we're also a business and we know that size isn't everything.
